New beginnings
How can you tell the future without meaning to?
I have been keeping a diary for years. What started out as poetic musings around 1997, turned into more of a question-and-answer-writing in which I tried to get answers for the deeper questions of life (and my personal life in particular). Gradually and eventually, it turned into a true diary. Over the last five years I have written basically continuously. These notebooks have become the chronicles of my inner evolutions, my growing processes, my doubts, my challenges and my unexpected successes.
By now, writing in my diary feels like feeding or cleaning myself: if I haven’t done it for as much as a few days, I start feeling very uncomfortable. I want to go over the events and evolutions I have experienced, the things I felt and understood, the ways in which my inner life is unfolding. I do this in order to remember them, understand them better, and to somehow also put them to rest.
You will find no lists of chores, meals or passtimes in my diaries. There will be no inventory of people I encountered and stuff I did. I only tell of events that were somehow important to me, or that left an imprint on my soul which I recognized as relevant, enriching or confronting. If someone, somewhere, somehow, in a distant future, should have any interest in reading my words, these notebooks will most probably be read as accounts of psychological growth.
But over the last two years my diary has also increasingly grown into a writer’s diary. My work has never featured more prominently in my daily concerns and evolutions than it has been doing for a good while now.
I don’t stop to consider any of it. All I know is I need to write it.
My diaries have another special feature. They have a knack of predicting the future.
In the course of time it caught my attention. When I had completed one, and looked back at what had happened during the time I had been writing in it, I could only conclude that the content matched the cover. A year of deep and important steps of fundamental personal and embracing new possibilities was recorded in a notebook that bore a handwritten fragment of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince on the front, including a hand-drawn star. A shorter, but extremely important period of spiritual awakening and shedding skin (the most fundamental part of my Plateau phase) was recorded in a slender notebook that showed a detail of the blue stained windows in Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia basilica (I bought the notebook in the cathedral bookshop when we were in Barcelona).
By november 2016, I found myself with the Gaudí diary completed, and no time whatsoever to get to one of the stores where they sold the kind of notebook I wanted and had come to enjoy. The only thing I had left on my shelf (I always have spare notebooks!) was a black Moleskine.
I love Moleskin. I wrote an entire novel’s first draft in one of those. Only, I hadn’t really considered it for a diary. I wanted something colorful, happier, with a theme or an image.
But I decided to accept what was there, and so, somewhat grudgingly, I adopted the black Moleskin. And almost instantly, I knew I would attach an image to the cover. Looking around for good-quality prints I had lying around, I stumbled across this one:
Jurgen’s, of course. A Sally Mann-variation on the very first Seth image he ever made, the colorful one that spoke to my heart and told me there was something extraordinary going on.
But I confess: I wasn’t convinced. Not at first. A black notebook. A dark and brooding image. And I had come to appreciate the subconscious divination process my diaries apparently possessed. So what did this choice tell me?
I decided to trust the process and just go for it. I started writing in this notebook right after my birthday in November 2016 — yes, the aftermath of what was probably America’s most nightmarish election — and I completed it less than a week ago. And boy, what a ride it’s been. And truly, once again the notebook cover turned out to be prophetic.
There is no describing the richness, depth and detail of all that is in this image that resonates with the events in my life over the last year and a half. The creative soulmateship that slowly unfolded until fully blossoming. The connection I felt ever more strongly to the mysteries of the universe, and the ways they presented themselves. The ever more outspoken presence of birds, of different species, as emissaries and carriers of meaning. Art. Divination. Knowledge. Sensitivity. Soul. All of it, right there. In a notebook I initially distrusted and an image I had doubted. Now I dare say the very happiest years of my life (so far) have been chronicled in this particular notebook.
A while ago however, I realized my notebook was nearing completion.
So what was to be its successor? I decided I was going to repeat the formula: I loved writing in the Moleskin, and I could put any image I felt was appropriate on the cover.
Again, the Universe did not quite let me have my way. Looking for a Moleskin notebook, I couldn’t find a single black one, lined, in the size I wanted. So I had to settle for a red one instead, and trust that it would somehow be right — once again.
Not too long after that, Jurgen was asked to make one more additional page of artwork for Mendel’s greenhouses, the 10+ children’s book we had finished last year. Nine full-page images was rich enough for a 40-page short story, but the editors wanted an extra image in which the main character Reya and her unexpected best friend Robin were shown together. When Jurgen told me about it, I suggested the scene where these two children withdraw into Reya’s secret hide-out, a cave-like dome with fluorescent plants.
Almost as soon as I saw it, I knew: this is the image for the new diary. It was a combination of gut feeling and reading the image, but I won’t go into it any further. I am not going to break the spell, and I will allow the Universe to run its course.
A new phase has begun, that much is clear, though. In more than one sense.
